Conflicts of duty and truth
Set in the years after Bannockburn, Fiona Watson’s new novel tells the story of an English noble with a secret identity. Review by Allan Massie
The Lies of the Flesh by FJ Watson Polygon, £9.99
Fiona Watson is an academic, a medievalist who has written a study of the early career of Robert the Bruce. This, however, is her second novel, and, like the first, Dark Hunter, it is set in the years after Bannockburn.
Surprisingly perhaps, they are both told from the English side. Well, why not? My own introduction to our Wars of Independence came from the Victorian writer of stirring stories for boys, GA Henty. He was an Englishman but the heroes of In Freedom’s Cause were the Scots.
In The Lies of the Flesh, the main characters are English men and women being terrorised by Scots raiding, killing, looting and burning the northern counties, specifically Westmorland. Yet, though it is a novel full of violence, blood, looting and slaughter, it is very different from your average medieval blood-curdler.
The title, The Lies of the Flesh, is significant. What are they? We are alerted to them in the first lines of the book: “His father wanted only boys. So a boy was what his father got. For 20 years Francis Hilton has done as Andrew Hilton told him to do, acting out in deed and words what a son should be”.
But now his father is dead, and Fran is head of the household and their land-holding. Though short in stature he has all the required skills. He rides and handles weapons well. He is liked and admired by servants and tenants. But he is playing a part not of his choosing, for Fran was born a girl, knows himself/herself to be a girl. Only his mother and maidservant know the truth.
Is it Fran’s duty to continue to be Francis, head of the family? His mother is sure he must, and he dare not reveal the truth to others. He would like to confess to his best friend, Will, a priest older than himself, with whom he reads books and plays chess. But would Will understand? He hesitates.
In any case, he has duties to perform. He must manage the small household, attend to estate business, ride out to watch for dangerous raiding Scots. He does it all well. He is admired and competent. But he is not comfortable in his mind, and then his mother, herself a Scot, leaves for the north because she is eyed with suspicion and resentment. One wonders if this is her only reason.
These are dangerous times; there have been murders, thefts, bloody quarrels. One presumed killer has been slain in revenge, and then, to general horror, seems to have returned, a ghost, or as they say, "a revenant". He must be hunted.
The first appearance of the revenant is certainly striking, even alarming. But when Fran boldly seeks him out and extracts his story, this and the violent horrors which follow are to my mind the least satisfying parts of the novel, just a bit over the top.
More satisfying is Fran’s dissatisfaction, his awareness that he is living a lie, that he is no longer at ease in his male clothes. That identity is not what he truly is, and yet how can he reveal what he has come to think of as the truth? How can he shed his responsibilities? There are many who depend on him.
The author handles his confusion and uncertainty deftly. In the early chapters Fran is always “he” in his thoughts; then, later, he is sometimes “she”, and the two pronouns shift in his confusion. Is this a credible question for the Middle Ages? One might think not, then wonder about Joan of Arc, while there are also several such cases in Greek and Roman history and legend.
What matters in a novel, of course, is whether the author has made what seems unlikely in the society being depicted persuasive, credible, and I think Watson brings it off, making certainly the theme of her novels more interesting and more satisfying than the common run of fiction set in the Middle Ages.
That said, there is too much sword play here, too many bloody deaths, much more of this sort of stuff than a novelist of Watson’s intelligence and imagination needs to serve up.
Indeed, the whole of the revenant business seems to be a mistake. Much is what we used to call “tushery”.
Yet there’s very fine stuff at the heart of this often compelling novel, and much fine treatment of the circumstances of everyday life in a bleak country.
It is very different from your average medieval bloodcurdler